Bibliotheca - Book News » Amazon Kindle

Amazon’s Kindle Digital Text Platform 70% deal 225

Alan — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 04:03:10 +0000

Beginning October 6, U.K. authors and publishers of e-books will be able to get a 70% royalty option at Amazon’s Kindle Digital Text Platform. This option has been available in the U.S. for months, but now the British will have it too. It means that instead of reaping only about one third of the profits from published book sales, they can claim almost three fourths of the lucre by publishing direct to Kindle.

The author/publisher’s profits will be minus delivery costs, which are based on file size at 10p per megabyte. The average e-book contains about 368KB, which makes the cost of delivery about 4p per book. The example given by Amazon shows the net profit to the author on a £5.99 (VAT exclusive) book as about twice as much as they got with the old option.

There are some qualifications for the 70% option, however. It is only available for in-copyright works, the book must be list priced from £1.49 to £6.99 and it must be at least 20% below the lowest price for the physical version. The latter stipulation may arouse some interesting controversy, since many e-books published these days are actually more expensive than their ‘hardback’ counterparts.

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New Kindle that allows readers to preview books

Alan — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 01:05:53 +0000

Amazon has just announced a new sort of Kindle that allows consumers to preview books. While it is true that Amazon already has a preview option for some of the books they sell, this is a little different.

The new Kindle option will run on any browser and will invite a preview of e-books offered by Amazon. This Web Kindle will interface with social networks and allow people to recommend e-books to one another based on the review. If you are reading an e-book you enjoy, you can share samples through Facebook. You can even earn money if your e-book referral prompts someone to buy it.

When users read the review portion of the e-book they will, most certainly, be guided to Amazon’s regular website to buy it. Of course, once it is purchased it can be read any way the user chooses, whether it is on the Kindle device, cell phone or computer.

Books enrolled in the Web Kindle will have the first chapter available to readers for their review. This in itself is nothing new since many book publishers currently offer up first chapters on Amazon. The fact that Amazon is now engaging the Kindle brand through social networks is the new and interesting element to this developing story.

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E-books are cheap according to publishers

Alan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:07:18 +0000

From the publisher’s point of view, consumers may be expecting too much (or too little) regarding the current and future price of books. While theoretically an e-book costs less to produce than a printed version of the same material, this is not necessarily the case.

According to a recent report in The New York Times, a breakdown of the relative costs involved in publishing a book in hardcopy as opposed to digital leaves less overall profit for the publisher, at least under current conditions. The example quoted shows the average cost to the consumer of a new hardcover best seller is about $26.00. Of that amount, about half goes to the publisher, but then there are additional costs such as cover design, copy editing and of course payment to the author. In this case the publisher winds up with just over $4.00, and there are still overhead costs like office space to be considered.

The new agreement between publishers and Apple’s iBookstore allots 30% of the sale price of an e-book to the hardware makers, leaving 70% for the publishers. From the gross profit, e-book publishers must pay to have the copy converted and typeset into digital form; marketing costs are also added in.

On the Amazon Kindle site, where hardcover best sellers are priced at $9.99, publishers are using the introduction of Apple’s iPad as leverage to raise their prices, and the competition in the bookselling market has become known in the industry as “the Amazon versus Apple E-book Wars.”

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